"There was the time a messy breakup led to a disgruntled lover offloading her ex-partner's prosthetic leg to the donation-based warehouse (they got it back with some identifying information). Or the time the corpse of a cat came buried in a bag of broken china. But Lindsay-Ceniceros's favorite finds are not bizarre but historical. "It's the cherry on the sundae when historical artifacts or time capsules come in," he said. "It feels like breathing the same air as someone lost in our pasts.""
"He could tell from the heft of a recent suitcase donation - and the pristine condition of the vintage photographs of athletes and artists within it - that it was something special. It arrived in August, at a time when the warehouse was processing over a thousand pounds of material every day for two weeks. He flagged it for his colleague Lisa Ryan, who has made research her specialty."
Jake Lindsay-Ceniceros works at Scrap, a Ruth Asawa-founded Bayview nonprofit that upcycles arts and crafts materials. He frequently uncovers unusual donated objects, including a prosthetic leg left after a breakup and a cat corpse buried in broken china. His preferred discoveries are historical artifacts and time capsules. A recently donated small suitcase contained pristine vintage photographs of jazz musicians, nightclubs, boxers, basketball games, and rare newspapers and magazines. Many items were autographed and inscribed. Lisa Ryan researched the contents and determined the materials belonged to a single individual and identified the owner as Warren "Duke" Bynum, a Chicago transplant who worked various jobs in San Francisco, including as a doorman at Elizabeth Arden.
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